They have selected Accenture PLC to build their official website, and Accenture in turn has decided that Google and their Video site YouTube are best equipped to handle the event.

It is estimated that about 400 million people will watch the event online. While this is a huge figure, nearly 2 billion are expected to watch on TV.

The official Google website will be the main source through which all authorised information will be relayed.

The revelation of the bride’s wedding dress is expected to generate much curiosity as also the kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

Live feeds will also be posted on Twitter and Facebook.  Other broadcasters like BBC and CNN will also be relaying the events and it is hoped that the internet will not collapse under the pressure.

In the past events such as the death of Michael Jackson and the inauguration of Barack Obama have generated a lot of interest but this event is expected to be bigger.

While experts believe that the internet will be able to hold out, it is hoped that the mobile networks, which will also see a lot of pressure will not collapse.

Prince William’s spokeswoman has said, ‘We can’t predict what is going to happen with the Internet, but we are doing this with Google and YouTube — and if anyone has the experience to do this, it’s Google and YouTube.”

Over the past few months a number of celebrities including Stephen Fry, Ashton Kutcher, Britney Spears and Barack Obama, to name only a few, and mainstream media companies such as CNN, BBC, The New York Times and many others have joined Twitter and are trying to out-do each other by collecting the most followers.

A few months ago, Stephen Fry and Barack Obama’s PR team led the most popular Twitter accounts, with a couple of hundred thousand followers each. Until yesterday, no single user account on Twitter had crossed the magical figure of one million followers.

The three hottest contenders for the million-follower mark were Ashton Kutcher, CNN and Britney Spears. The race actually started off when Ashton Kutcher announced, through a video, that he intended to beat the popular news channel CNN and be the first to have one million followers on Twitter.

Kutcher had started out on Twitter in a very modest way, but later he was joined by his equally famous wife Demi Moore and that really helped to generate a huge fan following. He also posted photographs of her bending down in her underwear on popular Twitter photo-sharing site, Twitpic, which brought a lot of public attention to his Twitter account.

Ashton has now succeeded in being the first to have a million followers on Twitter, and to celebrate his victory he has announced that he will donate $100,000 to the ‘Malaria No More’ fund, to help fight the rampantly prevalent disease in Africa.

While this gesture is definitely commendable, it seems quite silly that celebrities and the media are trying to beat each other at this game of winning more and more followers on the network. Other celebrities and media publications will reach that target soon enough, and each of them will probably make it sound like they have created history.

Twitter does not seem to mind. In fact, they were reported to have created a special position in the company to cater to their celebrity users.

This obsession with celebrities could destroy the original essence of the site, which had been started by a group of computer geeks, to keep in touch with each other.

Today, Oprah Winfrey posted her first tweet ever, and she already has 100,000 followers, more than double what the most popular geeks acheived after 3 years of using the service! Ellen DeGeneres posted her first Tweet only last month, and is already close to having a million followers.

With Twitter quickly turning into the average person’s hotline to the stars, the number of spam accounts is bound to rise. If the company does not handle its growth and the growth of associated spam on the service appropriately, the original users that helped bring up the service could leave and find greener social media pastures very quickly.

While CNN.com relayed the event live through its video player, status updates from Facebook users watching the video were streamed in the sidebar.

The integration between the broadcast on CNN.com and the status updates from Facebook was enabled through Facebook Connect, their equivalent of OpenSocial that was launched last month. Facebook Connect allows users to port their online identity across third-party websites that use the platform.
The relay of President Obama’s inaugural speech by CNN.com along with status updates by Facebook users is a great success for Facebook Connect, which has raced ahead of its rival Google Friend Connect, with this achievement.

According to reports, over 18.8 million individuals viewed the speech and recorded 1.3 million status updates during the speech. Obama’s Facebook fan page now has over 4 million fans and over 5,00,000 wall posts.

CNN broke its previous record of election day coverage, when they had 5.3 million streams. They relayed over 8 million live streams this time. In fact, some users on CNN.com actually had to wait for others to sign out before they could access the site.

In the first incident, a blogger reported that Apple was launching a laptop for just $800. This was a lie, of course, but was inadvertently repeated by the New York Times, giving far too much credibility to that lie.

What one blogger wrote may not have carried much weight by itself, but something written in a reputable publication such as the New York Times, which has a huge circulation, was read by a very large number of people and also believed to be true.

Given the present market conditions, most readers thought of this as a very good offer, and rushed to buy this new laptop. This initially raised the price of Apple’s stock, but when the truth came to light, the prices dropped sharply.

Only two weeks later, a young 18 year old blogger reported that Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, had suffered a heart attack. This not-so-innocent lie was again unwittingly repeated by Henry Blodget on the CNN website and soon Apple stock holders were running for cover, thus causing another dip in the stock prices.

An investigation is being conducted, to see if the blogger was trying to make some money by manipulating the stock prices. So far no evidence has been found to prove it. While those in favour of non-censorship of blogs, have so far maintained that blogging is a harmless activity, and allows one to express ones thoughts and feelings without interference, these incidents will force free speech proponents to look at another aspect to blogging, wherein lies can be intentionally spread and eventually cause untold harm.

The more important lesson, though, should be learned by so-called “journalists” at the major news channels who print any random gossip without even investigating how true it is.

According to the study, of the 500 people surveyed, 57% were found to use CNN, for news-related searches while 53% used Google. They were followed by MSNBC with 41%, Yahoo with 40% and MSN.com with 31%.

Further analysis of the study reveal, that one third of the participants said they could find a relevant news video, to their query, at the first attempt, most of the time, while another one third said, they could find the most up-to-date news most of the time, at the first attempt itself.

36% of the participants said, they were Very Likely, to watch a news video, which was listed on a search results page, while they were searching for a news story.

35% of them said they were Very Likely to watch a news video, embedded in a news article.

33% of the respondents felt that they would like to watch more videos in search results, while 20% disagreed with this view, and 47% were neutral.

It was also found that, 51% of people watch video news for under 1 hour a week, while 49% watch video news for over 1 hour a week, and only about 25% watch video news for over 3 hours a week.

79% of users use Search to know the local news. Of these 42% use the local station name as a query, 31% use the city name and 17% use the zip code of the area.

However it was found that TV still beats the Internet as a primary source of news.

Two thirds of the participants in this study were aged between 35 and 64 years, and more than one third of these had an income of over $100,000 per year.